President Donald Trump’s tortured relationship with the spoken word can lead to problems. Case in point, his remarks about Sweden at a rally in Melbourne, Florida on Saturday night. While Trump seemingly made a remark about a recent terrorist attack in Sweden, what he meant was the reported uptick in crime in migrant centers in the country. His remarks have ignited a firestorm online. I try to wade through it all to present to you what is exactly “going on in Sweden.”
If President Trump is right and there is a growing Islamic migrant caused crime wave in Sweden, the first step is to define when the surge in refugees from predominately Muslim countries started to spike in the country. Migrationsverket, the Swedish Migration Agency, has published country of origin data from 1980 to 2014 (pdf). This data does not include 2015, which saw the highest level of asylum seekers in the recent history of the nation.